YouTube temporarily suspends Logan Paul's ad revenue

Paul encouraged people to participate in the Tide Pod Challenge

Last month, popular YouTuber Logan Paul was roundly criticized by the media, fans and other YouTubers for uploading a video showing a suicide victim in Japan's "Suicide Forest." Apparently, he has not learned his lesson and has been stripped of ad revenue by YouTube after posting videos encouraging bad behavior.

“After careful consideration, we have decided to temporarily suspend ads on Logan Paul’s YouTube channels,” a YouTube representative said. “This is not a decision we made lightly. However, we believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers, but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community.”

After Paul's jaunt in Japan last month, YouTube removed him from Google Preferred, a premium ad group for content creators, and cancelled his YouTube Red video series. This new move goes one step further and hits Paul where it hurts creators the most... ad revenue.

In response to Logan Paul’s recent pattern of behavior, we’ve temporarily suspended ads on his channels.

Since returning to YouTube, Paul has uploaded several disturbing videos including one where he tasered a dead rat. He has also used inappropriate tags for videos and most egregiously, encouraged people to participate in the Tide Pod Challenge in which people eat Tide Pod detergent packs. The latter of which, YouTube has taken very seriously.

While the short-term effect of suspending Logan Paul's ad revenue will hurt him specifically, the long-term effect could harm other YouTubers as well.

Last year saw the brief reluctance of advertisers to display their ads on YouTube videos due to inappropriate content. However, this had the side effect of hurting otherwise harmless content creators who saw ad revenue drop sharply due to advertiser fears. Logan Paul's repeated stunts could potentially start another "Adpocalypse" in which advertisers drop support for popular YouTubers due to fear of being associated with inappropriate content.

YouTube could possibly drop Paul from the Partner Program completely which would permanently eliminate monetization from ads on YouTube. While that loss of income would be huge (SocialBlade estimates Paul earns about $1.2 million a month in ad revenue alone), Paul does have other streams of income via clothing and merchandising.